The Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes
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The Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes: A Collection of Impressions and Exercises Author(s): Caridad Svich, Brooke Berman, Migdalia Cruz, Julie Hébert, Anne García- Romero, Jennifer Maisel, Oliver Mayer, Han Ong, Lisa Schlesinger, Alisa Solomon and Alina Troyano Source: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Sep., 2009), pp. 1-32 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal, Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20627931 Accessed: 17-03-2017 18:10 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Performing Arts Journal, Inc, The MIT Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art This content downloaded from 128.36.7.89 on Fri, 17 Mar 2017 18:10:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE LEGACY OF MARIA IRENE FORNES A Collection of Impressions and Exercises Caridad Svich Writing is only another way of giving, a courtesy if you will, and a form of love. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry Itrained with Maria Irene Fornes at the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory in New York City from 1988 to 1992 during which time I also served as her Lab assistant. In 1995, Fornes directed my plzyAny Place But Here, which had been written while I was in the INTAR Lab under her mentorship, at Theatre for the New City. In 2000 I edited with UK scholar Maria M. Delgado Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes. As playwright, translator, and teacher, the four consecutive years during which I trained with Irene have impacted my work in every way. Although my undergraduate and graduate school training in theatre at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and the University of California-San Diego respectively gave me a strong foundation and emboldened me as a young artist, it was the work at the INTAR Lab, where I later returned as a TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist-in-Residence in 2003, that truly gave me the audacity to investigate theatrical form and to explore the U.S. Latino/a writing voice. As a practitioner-scholar and editor, a great deal of my work has been devoted to enabling the publication of and documenting the work of the "in-between" genera tion of U.S. Latino/a playwrights who trained with Fornes in New York City and in California at the Padua Hills Playwrights Conference. Students and emerging playwrights often ask me, "What was it like to work with Maria Irene FornesV" They usually ask me this question with awe and wonder in their eyes and a little bit of envy, because they know that the opportunity to work directly with Irene is no longer possible for them. Many of us in that middle gen eration of U.S. Latino/a playwrights have in fact taken on the job of passing on the methodology that she developed at the INTAR Lab and other organizations. Our job is humble and old-fashioned. We took down notes first-hand in the writing room, notes that we kept and have retold through our own dramatic visions in classrooms and workshops to the next generation(s) of American playwrights. As years pass the retelling becomes more complex because we are not only responding to our own memories and their transcription but also to how Fornes's work has been received ? 2009 Caridad Svich PAJ 93 (2009), pp. 1-32. 1 This content downloaded from 128.36.7.89 on Fri, 17 Mar 2017 18:10:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms over the years. As less of her extraordinary work is produced (unfortunately) on U.S. and world stages, the task becomes greater in passing on the legacy, for it becomes an instance of sharing a way of working in the room. This short collection of memories and writing exercises from some of Fornes's distin guished former students (Brooke Berman, Migdalia Cruz, Julie Hebert, Anne Garcia Romero, Jennifer Maisel, Oliver Mayer, Han Ong, Lisa Schlesinger, Alisa Solomon, Alina Troyano) over the years is a cross-section of not only time and geography but also length of apprenticeship under La Maestra, as we all affectionately called her. Among those featured in this special section of PAJ, Migdalia Cruz and I are the playwrights who worked with her for the longest, most concentrated period of time. Both of us were her assistants at different intervals in the Lab's history, which meant not only setting up the room for work every session but also writing down all the exercises every day for years. This act of transcription was to be the foundation for a book on playwriting Fornes was one day going to write entitled The Anatomy of Inspiration. Both of us were also part of the last year that she ran the Lab at INTAR (1992), a year when she decided she only wanted to work with writers whom she had previously trained. Among the writers that last year were Nilo Cruz, Lorraine Llamas, Lorenzo Mans, and Ela Troyano. It is nearly impossible to document with exactitude a sequence of exercises at the Lab, because work with Fornes was not only about fulfilling writing exercises but also about re-seeing the world and the possibilities that theatre can hold for a dramatist working with text and image. Part of the reason I think so many truly gifted and fearless writers came out of the Lab (Cherrie Moraga, Eduardo Machado, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Luis Santeiro, Octavio Solis, etc.) over its many years in existence under her leadership was the fact that she encouraged a very ruthless search for honesty: a profound unlocking of the verbal and visual imagination. Much of the writing that came from the Lab is noted critically for its visual daring, and Maria Irene Fornes is often cited as the influence for this because of her own early background in the visual arts. But I think that although the visual was certainly emphasized in the Lab, there was a great deal, if not more emphasis, on the power of language, the vibrating force of (sung and spoken) words in space, and the precision that theatre demands from a writer. Fornes pushed each of her writers, who were already gifted and were selected competitively through national application, to resist ease and comfort, to challenge language to its limits, and to test the resonant spaces of words themselves and their ability to shift energy and motion in a play. The training inevitably cen tered on character and how characters, even if they're mere unnamed voices, are the molecules that move a play forward and anchor an audience to the world onstage. To open this section, I begin with notes on landscape and voice that I've written inspired by the hours and years spent in the LAB. These notes are followed by an exercise from my work with Irene, specifically, from the second year I worked with her (1989). After this short essay and exercise, memories and transcriptions follow from colleagues of mine in the field. My thanks to them for generously giving their 2 PAJ 93 This content downloaded from 128.36.7.89 on Fri, 17 Mar 2017 18:10:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms time to record their memories. I first encountered Irene's plays when PAJ editor Bon nie Marranca taught a dramatic literature course at the University of California-San Diego in 1985. That encounter with the plays profoundly impacted my journey as an artist and thinker. My thanks to Bonnie Marranca for first bringing Fornes's work to my attention, and for asking me to put together this section for PAJ. LANDSCAPE AND VOICE To paraphrase Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life: The blank page is like a map 'detached from actual social practices,' effacing historical process and creating in its place a new logic: in writing we draw on what is external as our raw material, strip it of its particularity, process it through the mechanism of style and create a new product from it. And yet, while the blank page can be perceived as "detached," I also think once you begin to put pen to paper, the manner in which you inscribe its surface is very much part of a historical process of writing (and not, for example, oral storytelling). The page thus becomes part of a continuum of writers writing, and as a writer you are drawing as much on the raw material of the external as of the internal, and the history of writing itself (down to the page, parchment, scroll, etc.) Much has been written about the writer's relationship to landscape (tangible, physical, specific, geographic) as well as the internal terrain of emotions, memories, erasures, sensations, etc. Both (and more) come into play when you are writing a text for performance. For example, there are some plays I have written directly inspired by a place or city or series of cities where I have been. Other plays have been created out of scraps of places encountered: an invented landscape.